A literary blog for all seasons.

October 2012

10/31/2012

Tracy K. Smith's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection "Life on Mars" showed up at the local Barnes & Noble, and I decided to take it home.

Unfortunately, I thought the book quite pedestrian, with all of the dreary drawbacks of much contemporary poetry. Smith displays the typical pop culture references, attempts at stylistic novelty, and efforts at metaphorical surprise that can't cover up ordinary writing, mundane subjects and unexceptional imagination.

I found the TV show of the same name that had a brief run a few years ago more exciting.

10/29/2012

Today is the autumn day I wait for all year, the one that matches the spirit of John Keats' "To Autumn," to my mind the most perfect poem in the language and an essential expression of Romanticism. With crisp wind, blue skies and the leaves nearing their peak of autumn color, today feels like the day Keats described so many years ago.

Lately, I've been slowly reading Nicholas Roe's new life of Keats, a frequent subject of biographers the past 50 years or so. Roe has uncovered many new details about Keats and exhaustively traces connections among Keats and his family and friends. He fills in a lot of gaps left open in previous biographies, and makes more than a few speculative leaps. The autumn connection is appropriate this week, Keats' birthday was Oct. 31, at least on his birth certificate. His family said he was born on Oct. 29, 1795, 217 years ago today.

I suppose covers are not protected by copyright: Roe's book uses the same cover illustration of Andrew Motion's earlier biography of Keats, Joseph Severn's painting of Keats on the heath listening to the nightingale (shown below from the cover of Motion's book).

Severn, who cared for Keats in his final months, was neglected by Keats in his early days as a poet, Roe says. Pretty much snubbing young Severn, Keats rather sucks up to the then lauded artist Benjamin Haydon. Along with details about Keats' friendship with Haydon, Roe comes up with copious information about Keats' first literary acquaintances, including the most important, Leigh Hunt, the poet/journalist/editor/critic and political agitator who did prison time because of his radical views. The prison stay doesn't sound too daunting; Hunt was able to bring to his cell many personal belongings and comfort items and receive visitors.

Roe describes a scene I don't recall reading about before, a meeting between Shelley and Keats at Hunt's home. Shelley and Keats are entwined in literary history, through Shelley's eulogy to Keats and their joint burial in Rome's Protestant Cemetery. Older than both Keats and Shelley, Leigh outlived his young proteges by many years, eventually achieving the dubious immortality of being a model for one of Dickens' comic characters.

I've visited the Keats houses in Rome and Hampstead in London. Roe discloses a number of other locations for Keats, which made me desire to return to London and embark upon a Keats pilgrimage. Until then, I'll continue reading "To Autumn" and other Keats poems.

One striking and thrilling detail about Keats' emergence is emphasized by Roe. The young poet for months wrote the kind of juvenile verse that other beginning poets produce, nothing distinguishable from the verse churned out by his early rival Reynolds, some of whose work Roe cites. Then, all of a sudden, Keats produces "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer," which displays the control and vivid language of his mature poems. Genius makes a stunning appearance, with little previous foreshadowing. Roe notes the advance, but doesn't delve deeply into its cause. Was it a rush of inspiration, or a new confidence in technique? Or a miracle that can be ascribed to the mystery of genius?

Keats would struggle with later poems, especially his "Endymion," and even poems like "Ode to A Nightingale" are marred by clumsy writing. "On Looking Into Chapman's Homer" however anticipates the mastery of "To Autumn."

1.

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

2.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

10/26/2012

St. Crispin's Day recalls Shakespeare's Henry V and the British king's stirring victory over the French at Agincourt. King Harry's rousing speech to his outnumbered troops on the eve of battle in the patriotic play contributed the phrases "We Band of Brothers" and "the happy few" to the language. Robert Kennedy loved the "band of brothers" idea, and Stendahl dedicated "The Charterhouse of Parma" to the happy few, presumably those sophisticates who enjoy civilization's best.

The historic Agincourt has long fascinated me; at times I have felt the mystical sense that I was present at the battle on Oct. 26, 1425. Henry's ill and starving soldiers defeated a numerically superior French force. Reports vary on how much the British were outnumbered; it could have been as much as 5 to 1. The French also had a big edge in the number of horses. Some of Henry's men suffered from dysentery; unlike the beautiful uniforms and armor worn in films of the play, they fought naked, with watery shit running down their legs.

The British long-bow archers evened the odds, and battlefield luck did the rest. Henry stationed his archers on the sides, and their arrows spooked the French horses, which attacked from high ground and crashed into each other on a muddy, recently plowed field. The British also created a fortress with sharpened stakes from trees. With the French entangled with their fallen horses, many of them crushed into the mud and drowning, the British ran up to slaughter them, swinging swords and axes.

Another intriguing aftermath of the battle is that Henry ordered the killing of French prisoners, a severe violation of chivalric rules of battle. The controversy has raged through the centuries as to how many French nobles were killed and whether Henry was justified. Shakespeare himself gives a propaganda-ist defense of Henry.

The French military elite were decimated on that day. The tragedy echoes into the future; the English stood with the French in World Wars I and II, when French losses recalled the ancient debacle.

You Tube videos of Henry's St. Crispin's Day speech abound; one of the best is by Kenneth Branagh, from his Henry V movie of a few years ago.

10/25/2012

As a crew of excellent workers repaired a sink and a leak in an upstairs bathroom, I read Paris Review interviews via the venerated journal's app, downloaded for free on the Ipad.

The workers banged, painted and caulked and ran machines while I read interviews with poets Anthony Hecht and John Hollander. Hollander in 1992 at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, where he was a late sub for the mortally ill Howard Nemerov, bracingly criticized my poems.

I was interested in how in the PR interview he dismissed the value of poetry-writing workshops, because he enthusiastically led such workshops at Sewanee. I found him a warm and kind man.

My poetry career also included a near brush with Hecht. I was to attend a workshop he led at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, but decided to pull out. Soon afterward, Hecht died.

The Paris Review app offers a broad selection of the journal's celebrated interviews, along with back issues and books for purchase and daily news. Speaking of apps, I am writing this on my portable Ipad keyboard, publishing through the TypePad's rather basic app.

10/23/2012

Joe Queenan broke away from his regular weekly Wall Street Journal column Saturday with a piece on his lifelong reading addiction. The article on the front of the WSJ's Review section apparently was an excerpt from a new Queenan book coming out this week.

Queenan, whose "Closing Time" was one of the best memoirs I've read, wrote with his usual barbed wit. Talking about his many books, Queenan gave a spirited defense of the printed word on paper and bound between covers and dismissed the rise of e-books.

As a book collector with shelves full of hardbacks and paperbacks, I related to Queenan's piece. But, unlike him, I have entered full force into the e-publishing world.

Last Christmas, I received a Nook, Barnes & Noble's entry into the tablet wars. At first, I refused the Nook, declaring I would take it back. Realizing that this was a churlish attitude about a gift, I decided to try the Nook.

Well, almost a year later, I have immersed myself into the Nook world. Most of my books are now purchased via the Nook, a habit veering out of control. I also buy magazines on the Nook. The tablet has also changed my life as a music fan; most of the music I hear these days is from the Nook's Pandora App.

I still read printed books; mainly checked out from the library, and buy printed magazines. But the Nook has become my main reading method.

Books are fairly easy to read in the electronic mode, although I find magazines easier to read in print form, no matter how much larger I adjust the Nook's type size. I get the New Yorker on Nook and in print from the U.S. mail, and rarely if ever read articles on the Nook. On Mondays, when the Nook New Yorker hits my e-library, I get a preview of the magazine, but generally wait until the print edition arrives to actually read pieces. I do like the e-mag's special features, such as recordings of poets reading their poems.

I still like to have a book or two going in print. Overall, though, I wouldn't want to return to the print-only world. One of these days, I'll go even further, watching TV shows and movies on the Nook.

10/19/2012

Drew Jubera's "Must Win: A Season of Survival for a Town and Its Team" goes beyond its hyperbolic title with a rich, in-depth look at a small Southern city and its passion for high school football.

More than just a sports book, "Must Win" uses the 2010 Valdosta Wildcats season to examine education, race, religion, teen life, religion, hip hop, poverty, and urban problems. Along with that, sports fans will find a wealth of high school football lore.

Jubera, a longtime colleague of mine at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, spent a year in Valdosta to chronicle the Wildcats' 2010 season under new coach Rance Gillespie, hired to restore the Wildcats' declining football dynasty.

Once nationally known as the country's top high school football power under legendary coaches Wright Bazemore and Nick Hyder, Valdosta had declined in the 1990s after Hyder's unexpected death, of a heart attack in the school's cafeteria at lunchtime. With white flight and a falling population, the old inner-city school had watched nearby Lowndes County High rise in wealth and football power.

Jubera presents an engaging history of the town's football rise and fall, giving fascinating details of the city's and region's past and present along the way. Valdosta, on the eastern edge of U.S. 84 football crescent that swings through south Georgia, is the last stop on i-75 before tourists reach Florida. That geographical distinction has allowed the city to build a tourism industry based on interstate hotels and restaurants. Jubera delves into the area's agricultural past of turpentine production, when black workers were brutally exploited. He shows how that past echoes into the present day, when many black members of the Valdosta team are beset by poverty and violence.

The book is populated by an interesting group of characters, from longtime Valdosta boosters desperate to restore the glory days to football-addicted coaches and stressed teachers and parents. The most memorable characters are the handful of players whom Jubera highlights in heartbreaking, funny and endearing ways.

At times, Jubera's attempts at hip-hop flavored effects fall short, but those are rare blemishes. "Must Win's" intensely regional focus, as with Faulkner, gives it universal appeal. The book deserves national attention and readership.

10/18/2012

After the last post about Dwight MacDonald, I read beyond the titular essay of his "MassCult and MidCult: Essays Against the American Grain" to MacDonald's literary criticism in the same book. What a pleasure are his critiques of such writers as James Agee and James Gould Cozzens.

Of particular brilliance is his piece on Ernest Hemingway, in which he says that Hemingway became a prisoner of his distinctive style. MacDonald traces the arc from the highly innovative early stories to the late decline, when his work sank to self-parody, although MacDonald apparently wrote his critical essay before the release of "A Movable Feast," Hemingway's memoir of his early Paris days that's widely considered a masterpiece. MacDonald also refers to "A Farewell to Arms" as Hemingway's best novel. The book's weaknesses, many of them probed by MacDonald, are now widely apparent, sinking its reputation. "The Sun Also Rises" now is considered Hemingway's strongest novel. No matter which of his novels might be thought of as his strongest, Hemingway's greatest gift was as a short story writer, as MacDonald aptly affirms.

The Hemingway piece includes the treat of an appended response from George Plimpton, who, unlike MacDonald, actually met Hemingway. Plimpton did the Paris Review interview of Hemingway, one of Hemingway's strongest expressions of his art. In contrast, MacDonald refers to the piece that set the template of the boorish Papa stereotype, Lillian Ross' New Yorker profile of Hemingway on a trip to Manhattan. In the piece, Hemingway is shown at his insufferable worst, drinking and boasting and talking in belligerent Papa-speak.

MacDonald's literary and social criticism are wonderfully readable. In a book decrying the lowering of cultural standards in midcult and masscult, he wrote accessible pieces of great value to those seeking high-culture sophistication.

10/17/2012

I first encountered Dwight MacDonald reading his movie reviews in the wonderful old Esquire, circa 1970. The scarred intellectual warrior was among a great stable of columnists assembled by the magazine's legendary editor Harold Hayes. Later, I read more about MacDonald, veteran of the Partisan Review, Harry Luce's Fortune and his own Politics. I even read a biography of the left-wing polemicist.

So, after a recent flurry about the re-release of MacDonald's "MassCult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain," reissued by the New York Review, I searched for the collection in the "shop" section of my Nook, and was pleased to find it. So, in a possibly midcult gesture, I downloaded the collection.

MacDonald, who labels Esquire and the New Yorker, for which he also wrote, midcult, criticizes the erosion of cultural standards and the new middle class's pretensions of artistic refinement. The old leftist sounds like one of the conservative New Criterion's writers. Like the late HIlton Kramer, MacDonald skewers the 1950s insecure desire for culture embodied by such developments as the Great Books marketing program from the viewpoint of modernism, although MacDonald calls himself a champion of the avant garde, artists like Picasso and poets like T.S. Eliot who first broke the bounds of high culture, then were considered its exemplars.

While some commentators see MacDonald as dated, his work is all too relevant to today's even more degraded cultural environment. He skewered the love for masscult, bad TV shows and kitschy art, long before the rise of reality TV and our pseudo-celebrity obsessions. It would be hard today to say what is midcult; high culture has been even more defeated. And what would MacDonald make of the rise of the Internet, e-publishing and cable TV news?

10/10/2012

I just happened to see a web page report that Detroit Lions and later TV star Alex Karras has died. I associate Karras, the Lions' all-pro defensive lineman in the1960s, with one of my best childhood reading experiences, George Plimpton's "Paper Lion."

My parents subscribed for a time to the Book of the Month Club, and one of the hardbacks that arrived in a form fitted cardboard box was Plimpton's account of trying out for quarterback with the Lions. The zany Karras, who took to playing made up comic Nazi characters to ward off training camp boredom, was a star of the book, one of the first hits in the emerging literary sports-book genre. I can still remember the book's dust jacket, with a photo of the shaggy-haired Plimpton in his Lions uniform, No. 0, as I recall. Plimpton discussed his humiliation at trying to play quarterback for the Lions, who good naturedly accepted him, finishing with an account of his actual appearance in an exhibition game. The book was one of the first "New Journalism" works I read and remains one of the best.

Karras later starred in the movie version of the book, launching him on his acting career highlighted by the TV show "Webster." In the show, he and his TV wife adopted a black kid. I have a few impressions of the show, including that I had a mini-crush on the woman who played his TV wife.

I also knew Karras from my father's subscription to Sports Illustrated; he along with the Packers' Paul Hornung was suspended for a year by NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle for gambling ties. That was one of the big sports stories of the early '60s. I also recall Karras from another memorable childhood experience, watching on Thanksgiving Day as the Lions upset the undefeated Packers, totally dominating the Pack in one of the most amazing sporting events of my youth. Back then, the NFL always delivered unexpected excitement.

The Packers went on to finish that season with only one loss. I don't remember if they played in the first Super Bowl that year, or whether that came later, and just winning the NFL championship was the thing. While I liked the Packers, the Bears and other NFL teams, I really loved the AFL, to me the most exciting football ever played.

When I was a kid reading Plimpton's account of trying out for the Lions, little did I know that Plimpton was the Paris Review's editor, and that I would later have a lifelong adult readership of the journal. At several times in my life, beginning in my college days, I have subscribed to the PR, and have continued reading it ever since. I've read many memoirs about Plimpton's New York and Paris literary days, but my favorite memory of him will always be as the New York writer seeking to play quarterback for the Lions. Farewell, Alex, who came to life in Plimpton's book, a great literary character as well as a great player and a fine comic actor.

10/05/2012

Gay Talese, who's rarely if ever published in The New Yorker during his illustruous career, broke into the august magazine a couple of weeks ago with a profile of New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi. In tandem with the piece, The New Yorker web site ran a video of Talese giving a tour of his "bunker," his writing office located in the basement below the New York townhome he shares with his wife, Nan, the noted book publisher.

To enter his retreat, Talese must walk down the stairs of his townhome, traverse a few steps on the sidewalk, then go down a few more stairs to a room that once served as a wine cellar. The video shows Talese making this short jaunt. Once in his hideaway, Talese displayed a glee in his work, and clothing.

The dapper, elegantly graying man, saying his haberdashery derives from his Italian heritage, sported a beige suit, blue striped shirt, yellow tie and staw fedora. His soundproof office, which lacks a phone, is crammed with files of Talese's work for five decades. He gave a demonstration of his reporting methods, how he interviews his subjects without taking notes, then immediately writes down the conversation on pieces of cardboard specifically cut to fit his jacket pockets. Connecting to his sylish clothes, the cardboard looked like the kind cleaners place into startched shirts. I was somewhat surprised to see Talese working on a desktop computer; I half-expected him to be of the old school that still works on a typewriter, or even writes longhand. That Talese in his 70s remains so vital and attractive is inspiring.

Much of Talese's classic work was done for Esquire magazine. It's good that the New Yorker is now accepting Talese's pieces; editor David Remnick has opened the magazine to a wider variety of writers.

The piece on Girardi displays the controlled qualities of masters like Talese, who uses simple declarative sentences and well-chosen facts such as hitting statistics to build an interesting, understated narrative. His profile reminded me of the work of another master long associated with The New Yorker, John McPhee.

Talese, McPhee and Robert Caro are among a generation of writers who gave heightened literary quality to nonfiction writing. Tom Wolfe is another illustrous member of that generation, who, however, has turned to novel writing late in his career.

With eulogies of print continuing, a new generation of writers such as Katherine Boo and Michael Lewis have continued producing vital nonfiction works, continuing in the path of Talese, McPhee, Caro and others.

The recent death of legendary New York Times publisher Punch Sulzberger made me want to go back to Talese's classic book "The Power and the Glory," about how Sulzberger revitalized the Times. Seeing the video of Talese in his work space increased my desire to revisit that book, along with Talese's other work, such as his Esquire pieces on Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra. Talese is such an epitome of New York style and culture, that it's striking to remember that he is a proud graduate of the University of Alabama.